Beyond Branding: the Value of Intersectionality on Streaming TV

TVNXXX10.1177/1527476419852241Television & New MediaChristian 852241research-article2019 Article Television & New Media 1 –18 Beyond Branding: The © The Author(s) 2019 Article reuse guidelines: Value of Intersectionality sagepub.com/journals-permissions https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419852241DOI: 10.1177/1527476419852241 on Streaming journals.sagepub.com/home/tvn TV Channels Aymar Jean Christian1 Abstract This article argues that independent TV channels releasing narratives of intersecting identities innovate in the organization and technological dissemination of representations, specifying cultural production in ways that more fully value communities in the United States and at times abroad. Through interviews with founders of ten currently running and defunct independent channels, I show how the value of intersectionality is not simply in branding corporate channels or supplying them with new narratives but also in critiquing and reinventing industrial practices to accommodate communities historically excluded from the system. These indie channels allow scholars to see the work of development itself, chronically understudied despite its rapid expansion through net-neutral web distribution and its legacy as the process from which all TV shows emerge. Keywords television, distribution, race, development, representation, Internet In Hollywood, once a producer creates a hit TV show, they start developing more shows with existing corporate channels. Whereas online, once indie producers create a hit show, they may be inclined to start their own distribution channel. This is what Sean Anthony Torrington did after creating No Shade, a comedy about the ballroom community starring four black queer artists, three men, and one transwoman trying to make it in New York. No Shade premiered in 2013 on YouTube and quickly amassed 1Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA Corresponding Author: Aymar Jean Christian, Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, Northwestern University, 2240 N Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208, USA. Email: [email protected] 2 Television & New Media 00(0) a solid fan base, many of whom were upset at the mainstream appropriation of black queer vernacular—terms like “realness” and “slay” popularized cable TV shows like Real Housewives and Love & Hip Hop. “It’s everywhere now . I just wanted to show where it originated,” Torrington told me in 2015. He started The ARTKUTEC that year as a channel to distribute No Shade and other queer web series and videos online and via mobile. Seeing demand “doubling every week,”1 Torrington quickly rebranded the platform as SLAY TV, a subscription channel and platform including live events in New York. “I really, really realized the value of ownership over our culture,” he told me in 2017. Torrington reclaimed “slay” for the black queer community that popularized the term, which means to perform at such a high level as to eliminate all competition. Through new media distribution, he claimed the value of the intersection of blackness and queerness in a competitive marketplace and society that does not consistently value intersectionality. The scale of U.S. television has expanded. Distribution has moved away from a few heavily regulated broadcast channels to many channels of various sizes, business strat- egies, and technologies. We first saw the rise of a few new broadcast networks like FOX and UPN and then a growing number of cable channels, driven by niche market- ing: narrowcasting, dualcasting, or multicasting (Himberg 2014; Sender 2007; Smith- Shomade 2004; Zook 1999). After the commercial release of the Internet, the United States has seen the growth of a rich array of distributors: individuals creating and releasing their own shows for social media; corporate entities producing, packaging, licensing, and selling serial narratives; and an influx of cash-rich tech companies like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, and even Twitter using their deep coffers to develop original programming for billions of dollars (Cunningham et al. 2016). “Network TV” is now “networked TV,” fully transformed from a one-to-many (broadcast, cable) to many-to-many (web, mobile) distribution system capable of developing a wider scale of programming. Development has expanded with distribution. Development executives purchase rights to release series, tens to hundreds of thou- sands of dollars for an idea or script, and many millions once a pilot or full season is ordered. Development is how series are valued for distribution. The process of development—buying shows and paying artists to make them—structures how TV executives value stories for a channel’s brand. Through branding, these shows constitute an evolving story about the channel and help solidify the distributor’s importance in the lives of audiences or fans. Distributors need to brand themselves because they need audiences to recognize their slate of shows as culturally relevant and distinct from competitors. Branding is ambivalent; it evades clear politics to turn stories into con- sumable products (Banet-Weiser 2012). Historically, legacy TV development executives have found diverse cultural representation too risky and the presumed audience too small for the multimillion price tag. Particularly risky have been series embracing intersectionality, with lead characters and producers who are multiply marginalized (e.g., black and brown women, queer and trans people of color, immigrants who are religious minorities, poor disabled people, etc.). But since the 2010s, producers whose identities were once deemed unmar- ketable have secured “development deals” with cable and Internet distributors and the Christian 3 brands that finance them. The most prominent of these includes the roster of diverse TV producers Netflix and Amazon recruited for development deals, some valued at upward of $100 million, including Shonda Rhimes, Ryan Murphy, Kenya Barris, Jill Soloway, and even Barack and Michelle Obama. Young creators have also secured deals after years of producing short-form digital work, including Lena Waithe, Issa Rae, Numa Perrier, Franchesca Ramsey, Nicole Byer, Jay Versace, Quinta Brunson, Amy Aniobi, Miles McKenna, Freddie Wong, Hannah Hart, and Ryan O’Connell to name just a few. The attractiveness of “short-form” producers to distributors of longer- form programming indicates the increasing value of what has historically been deemed marginal. Representation has expanded in response to rising competition in distribution and development. There are now many types of TV, short- and long-form with episode lengths from one minute to over sixty minutes. The increasing scale of networked distribution has opened a space for experimentation and cultural diversity, shifting how we assess the value of culture and branding. The distance between margins and center, on the surface, appears to be narrowing (Curtin 2009; Julien and Mercer 1988). Eager to attract attention in a competitive landscape with upwards of 450 long-form series (thirty- and sixty-minute episodes) and countless short-form series, both legacy and streaming TV channels have shown a renewed appetite for cultural difference (Ryan 2016). We have more diverse shows, but the channels developing and distributing them are not substantially more representative. Corporate legacy channels get brand value from intersectionality but are not consistently investing in those artists/communities. Jennifer Fuller theorized that TV shows about black people branded cable channels by making them appear “edgy” and “real,” citing series from HBO’s Oz, Showtime’s Soul Food, Lifetime’s Any Day Now to a range of other programs that inaugurated the first wave of original narrative programming from cable networks in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Fuller 2010). Cable channels used cultural diversity to market themselves as different from safe, diluted broadcast TV. Herman Gray and Kristal Zook make similar arguments about why broadcast networks adopted black- cast sitcoms in the 1990s, as they turned to black audiences to stay relevant and stabilize audiences during the rise of cable; black gay and women characters played a critical, under-recognized role in this period, as did Latinas (Beltrán 2009; Coleman and Cobb 2007; Davila 2001; Fuller 2010; Gray 2004; Martin 2015; Smith-Shomade 2002; Zook 1999). But these scholars note how interest in diverse representations is inconsistent. It waxes and wanes with technological, regulatory, and organizational changes. I argue we can expand the theory of blackness’ branding value in distribution to intersectionality’s value—the value of stories by and about characters who live on the margins of the intersections between race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, disability, citizenship, religion, and so on. They attract underserved communities, encourage social media participation, and elicit critical attention for their novelty. For large-scale distributors from CBS and HBO to Facebook to Netflix, intersectionality brands channels as adventurous or artistic. We can think of how Amazon’s hit series Transparent transgresses norms of gender and age representation or how Netflix’s Orange Is The 4 Television & New Media 00(0) New Black represents women of color across class and sexuality. Both series, scoring a raft of Emmy and other prestigious nominations, helped establish those distributors as legitimate television distributors. Although Michael Newman and Elana Levine suggest the “legitimated” television of the networked era

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